by Jan Weiss
“I see. Of course, I will make every attempt.”
“There is also the matter of the attacks on the trucks hauling away the piled-up garbage.”
Gambini nodded nobly. “I heard about that, on the news.”
“Do you suppose there is any way to negotiate a cessation of the hostilities that brought this about?”
“I couldn’t say definitively. But offhand I’d say … no.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Is there more I can help you with?” he said.
“We’ve made an arrest in the Steiner murder case and released your nephew from custody.”
“I was pleased to learn of his vindication.”
“The matter is closed, but I keep wondering about some aspects concerning the victim.” Natalia took out an envelope of Luca’s telephoto snapshots of Gambini and Teresa Steiner enjoying themselves on the town. She passed them over to him.
“Why are you giving me these?”
“I didn’t think you’d want them seen by others and possibly made public at some point. Or misconstrued.”
“Misconstrued?”
“And I thought you might want them as mementos.”
“When did you figure it out?”
“That she was your daughter? You weren’t entirely forthcoming about how often you’d seen her in Naples, and it raised suspicions. We finally received the report from Berlin on your activities and movements there. Nothing in the German records linked you to her or her mother. But on nearly every trip to Germany, you visited Ulm, although you had no business interests there whatsoever. Ulm—where Teresa was raised and lived with her single parent. Ownership of the two German firms that paid for her care and education doesn’t trace back to you either, but both proved to conduct considerable business with your shell companies. Or am I a victim of my own imaginings?”
Gambini closed his eyes, massaged them with his fingers, then said, “No, you’re not wrong. I met her mother when she was seventeen. We were young. I was just married and unprepared to be so taken with her. And she with me. By the time I came to my senses, she was pregnant. I made arrangements, got her out of Naples, out of Italy. Married off to Herr Steiner to give the child a name. Then divorced. It was all through lawyers. Her mother and I—we didn’t meet again.”
“The visits to Ulm?”
“Anonymous. I only saw my daughter from afar. In the park. Coming out of school. Playing soccer. She played rough. Sliding into opponents, red hair flying.”
“Did she know all along that you were her father?”
“No one knew. She didn’t, until her mother confessed it on her deathbed. Soon afterward she showed up in Naples and approached me. I never had other children. With Teresa, I thought we might actually have a relationship. Instead of being appalled by my … work, she seemed excited by it. She wanted to know everything.” He looked out onto the vista of the bay. “It was wonderful to have a daughter. At first.”
“At first?”
“Before she got angry. Angry at my abandoning her, missing her childhood. Angry that I wouldn’t publicly acknowledge her even now. She’d love me one moment, erupt the next—shouting, carrying on. I was generous with her. It didn’t help. She tried things no one else would have dared. Skimmed the take from the shrines. Attempted sabotage of my business in Germany. Conspired and plotted with everyone she came in contact with. As if they wouldn’t inform me. It was unbearable. And personally painful in the extreme.”
Gambini took out a cigarette but didn’t light it.
“To the point that now I find myself thinking maybe Father Pacelli did me a favor. Killing her.” Gambini lit his cigarette. “She had to be killed, of course. But I couldn’t face doing it.”
“But Frankie and his young son—that you could face?”
Gambini inhaled deeply. “You looking to solve another murder? What’s your interest in Frankie’s death?”
“Safety—for his wife and her two children.”
“Your oldest friend, right? Go on.”
“I will keep the secret of your paternity if you guarantee they’ll stay safe from you.”
Gambini laughed. “Sure. You have my word,” he said, and laughed again.
Natalia took out the negatives to the pictures on the coffee table. “I’m missing the joke.”
“The joke is that I didn’t have Frankie dealt with. We weren’t on good terms at the moment, but not bad enough to.…”
“I’m … confused.”
“And their kid,” Gambini said, “he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. They didn’t see him. His head was below the window.”
“What are you saying?”
“Your oldest and dearest, Lola, came to me when things were shakiest between me and Frankie. She had a proposition. She’d ingratiate herself with Strozzi’s bunch and spy on them for me, if Frankie left the scene.”
“Why would she?”
“You know too much for your own good, Captain Monte.” The words came out with the smoke. “That’s unhealthy in this town.”
“Why are you telling me, then?”
“I didn’t want you thinking ill of me.” In one motion, Aldo Gambini rose. Elegant. His party’s next nominee to the Chamber of Deputies.
“Good-bye, Captain Monte.”
When she got back to the station, an elderly couple was waiting for her. Teresa Steiner’s grandparents, come all the way from Palermo to take their granddaughter home. They’d come on the train, second-class. They were going back by plane—a private jet.
Natalia drove them over to see Dr. Francesca and view the body. She worried that the ordeal might be too much for the white-haired couple. They’d already buried their daughter, now their grandchild. But they came from a hard life. Not so much as a sniffle or tear when the curtain was drawn back in the viewing area. Teresa Steiner was beautiful; the morticians had done exemplary work for Mr. Gambini.
Afterward, they signed the requisite forms and sat waiting for the hearse.
Dr. Francesca stopped by and apologized for the delay in releasing the body. “But everything is in order now. We will provide a police escort to make sure you get to the airport without problems.”
“Thank you.” The elderly woman turned to Natalia as the doctor left. “We have a family plot.” She twisted her wedding ring anxiously. “We will look after her.”
A road accident stalled traffic and delayed Natalia’s return. When she finally reached her office, Pino was in her chair and on her phone, an extended finger signaling trouble. He signed off and replaced the receiver slowly, deep in thought and a little apprehensive.
“You saw Gambini earlier?” he asked.
“Yes, at his elegant new offices. But you knew that.”
“Yes,” Pino said.
“Why are you puzzled?”
“Surprised, really.” He stood. “Gambini’s dead.”
“Really? How? Who did it?”
“No suspects yet.”
“At his office?”
“No, a park. You’re going to love this. He was shot dead by a mobile. A fake four-shot cell phone. Antenna muzzle. Two .22 calibers fired close up. Hit right behind the ear.”
“Professional.”
“Very.” Pino surrendered the desk chair and handed her a message slip. “They want statements from you, about your visit, your whereabouts at the time of the shooting. You know the drill.”
“What are the bodyguards saying?”
“They weren’t with him. He went there alone. A groundskeeper said he saw a woman in black coming from the vicinity.”
“Where did it happen?”
“On Capodimonte.”
“A small grove behind the museum.”
“Yes, exactly. How did you guess?”
Natalia made for the door.
“Where are you going, Natalia? You’ve got to be interviewed. Natalia!”
* * *
17
* * *
Natalia drove back to the old neighborh
ood and parked near the building where she used to live. On the sidewalk, a man prayed beneath a statue of Christ. Painted gold, it was nailed to the trunk of a magnificent tree whose shade Natalia had appreciated summers when she was a girl. Vandals had broken off one of the Savior’s arms. As Natalia walked past, the supplicant stood up and kissed the plaster form.
She proceeded to the palazzo of Mariel and Lola’s grandmother, where Lola was staying. The officers on duty downstairs, guarding her, said she’d been in all day. But there was no answer when Natalia rang the bell. When she finally telephoned, Nonna answered and told her to come right up. Lola was expecting her.
The ancient elevator clattered and groaned to the sixth floor, and Natalia got off. The hallway was still painted green—“like an avocado,” Lola always teased her nonna. It was dim as ever.
Lola met her by the door, wearing Capri pants and a black top printed in gold.
“Kids still away?” Natalia said.
“Yeah.” Lola led the way inside.
Nonna retired to her room. The two women sat at the dining table, where Lola had been filling a huge ashtray with half-smoked cigarettes.
“I hope you didn’t leave any of those at the scene,” Natalia said. “They’ll take DNA evidence off them.”
“I’m impressed. How’d you figure it out so fast?”
“I saw Gambini just this afternoon. Right before you lured him to the museum garden, the one you and I loved so much when we were kids.”
“I left no trace. Not a fingerprint, footprint, nothing. In fact, I’ve been here all afternoon. Ask my bodyguards downstairs. Or Nonna.”
“… who was napping, as usual, after lunch, no?”
“No one saw me.”
“A groundskeeper saw a woman in black … at a distance.”
“All the widows in Naples wear black. That’s half the city. So what?”
“Gambini told me almost everything. He said you were infiltrating Strozzi’s organization to spy for him.”
“Yeah, well.… Now I’m doubly glad I shut him up before he ruined the rest of my life.”
“He told me you wanted Frankie dead, and he obliged. Why, Lol?”
Lola’s face suddenly looked old, the wrinkles around her eyes more pronounced. Her eyes themselves seemed closed off, as if the windows to her soul had been transformed to mirrors. “When Frankie and I got married, I knew he might be killed. He’d chosen a dangerous business, after all. A Camorra widow … I was prepared. But to be cheated on with young girls? No way! Frankie swore he would be faithful. And he knew what would happen if he broke his promise—so help him God.”
She dabbed at her mascara.
“And he was faithful, too. Until last year.”
“How could you tell he wasn’t?”
“The way he looked. Guilty. And then I found a lipstick in our car. Not my color. I begged him to end it. He promised. But he didn’t. ‘She’s pregnant,’ he told me. Can you imagine? That was just before the German turned up. Teresa Steiner. Frankie didn’t like her—and he got in trouble with Gambini. Zazu threatened him with a ban of suspicion. We would have been silenced. No one allowed to speak to us until the suspicion was disproved. Teresa wanted me to go in with her. Crazy schemes. I feared for all of us.”
“Go on.”
“Frankie hid out with his girlfriend, left me and the kids alone, unprotected. He left me to deal with Teresa, with everything. I went to Gambini and said I could solve his problem with Bianca Strozzi by defecting to her mob if he would do me this one thing that would completely convince Bianca my break with the organization was final and irreversible.”
“Bombing Frankie’s car.”
“Yeah. But the fools blew up Frankie and my Nico both.”
Tears welled again. “They were sorry, Gambini said. They didn’t see the boy.”
Never could Natalia have imagined anything like this. How many dozens of times had she hung out with Lola here—sat on this shabby wine-and-white-striped couch, and in the bedroom where Lola had modeled her first bra for her and Mariel?
In this very room, Lola had confessed her first kiss, her first lover. At the large walnut table, the girls had eaten her grandmother’s biscotti and fretted about their waistlines and complexions, about what their husbands would be like, what their lives would be. Never this.
“Eliminating Gambini, was that part of your scheme all along?”
Lola nodded. “Yes. I’d had it with him after he brought Teresa in. And I’d had it with Frankie too.” She reached for Natalia’s hand. “Now that’s it’s over … I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I thought I would. I don’t. I hope you’re not thinking I’m going to confess like that besotted priest.”
“Listen to me. If they find this out, they’ll take you down and everyone connected to you—me, and Mariel—especially if they get wind that you used me as a go-between to broker a deal for Bianca Strozzi in her bookstore. They’ll kill you with your kids in your arms. Then do the kids too. It has to remain a secret, Lol. You and I are the only two who will ever know.”
“I swear it.”
“Swear on your kids, Lola. No one else will ever hear from you what you did.”
“I swear. You’re not going to arrest me, are you, Nat?”
“You’ll work for Strozzi. Run whatever for her. You’ll raise the kids. You’ll—”
“Nico was the cutest baby. My first. Remember the black curls? Cara mia, I’m afraid for my babies.”
Natalia squeezed Lola’s hand. “We’ll figure it out. You’ll all be okay. Mariel and I will help.”
On the sideboard was a photograph, black and white, of the three of them in school uniforms and braids.
“Which birthday was it that we swore undying friendship?” Natalia asked.
“Mariel’s eleventh,” Lola said.
“No boy would ever come between us,” Natalia recalled. “No man. We were in Piazza Dante. We treated ourselves to pizza. Then we exchanged lipstick. Not blood.”
There were shouts from the street—people talking, kids fighting, the snatch of a song.
The air felt limp and damp. Natalia recognized the flowers Mariel had brought days ago. Peonies. They occupied a vase in the center of the table. Their pink blossoms were splayed open now, edged with rust. She inhaled their perfume—rotten, yet sweet, the scent of her beloved city.